Look before you leap

As Obama prepared to give his speech yesterday the RNC was looking for anything to hit him for and criticize him for. And why not, that's their job. So as the gerbils ran furiously around the wheel in Michael Steele's head, he finally seized upon what he thought was a slice of fried gold: Obama was making a point to speak in the hall of the place that held the Constitution and the son of a bitch once had the nerve to call that document "fundamentally flawed". Jackpot! To the Twitter-machine!

RNC: as he prepares to deliver remarks in hall that holds the constitution, flashback obama: "constitution flawed" http://bit.ly/tFL7O #RNC [Twitter, 5/21/09]

The problem? The fundamental flaw Obama was referring to was the fact that the Constitution not only allowed slavery, but only counted black people as 3/5th's of a person. That the framers did not see blacks or slavery as "a moral problem involving persons of moral worth."

So the RNC basically just went out of it's way to criticize the President for thinking that blacks should have been bumped up to a whole 5/5th's and maybe got paid for their work. It's a bold strategy. The "We believe the Constitution was so right that we need to go back to using the 3/5th's compromise" move is a risky gambit, but I can see why the RNC wants to try it.

I'm not sure the Democrats will go for it, so I think I've come up with a new compromise: blacks go back to 3/5th's but we bump gays up to having the marital rights of 2/5th's of a person. Add it in together and that constitutes the two groups having the rights of a full person. We honor the Constitution like the RNC now thinks we should (except for the parts about the President followin' laws and stuff) and we make our country 2/5th's of the way more progressive towards gays. Win-win.